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Although action films have been discussed at length within film studies and film criticism, they have more often been considered in relation to issues pertaining to narrative and spectacle (King, 2000), gender (Tasker, 1993) masculinity (Gallagher, 2006), stars (Williams, 2019), visual effects (Whissel, 2014), politics (Jeffords, 1994), and their historical development (Lichtenfeld, 2007), rather than an attempt to understand what action in film is in and of itself.
Action Scenarios
This website aims to answer that question by taking an action scenario approach and combining it with an empirical analysis of action in films. To do so first requires identifying the shape of action in films. Without some sense of what action is, it would be impossible to isolate and classify such moments in films. In my book, Action Scenarios in Film: The Essential Guide to Action in Film, I identify action in films as historically recurrent narrative scenarios that made their first appearance during the silent cinema and have continued to reappear in films to this day. These historically recurrent scenarios are: rescue, escape, capture, heist, fight, pursuit, and speed. While other forms of action appear in film, they do not appear to the same extent as these scenarios over the course of film history. In addition, as my book demonstrates, action in film routinely appears in combination. For instance, in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965), James Bond is driving in his Aston Martin DB5 and is soon pursued by an assailant in a Ford Fairlane, who fires at him with his revolver. Before Bond has an opportunity to respond, an assassin suddenly appears on a motorcycle that is equipped with rockets which are fired at the assailant’s vehicle, causing it to burst into flames and crash into a ditch, where it explodes. Within an action sequence less than a minute in duration, two action forms – the pursuit and the fight scenario – are manifested.
Measuring Action
Once one has a reliable set of categories to classify action, one can discover their manifestation in film, be they in combination or not. The next task is to quantify them in terms of their duration. The automotive pursuit sequence in Thunderball, for example, is a mere 54 seconds in length, but contemporary action sequences can extend for much longer. The climactic battle in The Magnificent Seven (Antoine Fuqua 2016), for instance, is over 27 minutes long. Just by classifying action sequences in relation to the action categories they exhibit, and by measuring their duration, one can already obtain significant information that can be used to investigate a range of relevant and unanswered questions about action in films, and analyze them in ways with more precision to how they are currently discussed within film studies.
One important issue that this approach can investigate is the historical development of action in films in relation to the degree to which they manifest action. James Kendricks, amongst others, claims that during the 1980s and 1990s the ‘pure action film’ appeared, which possessed longer and more frequent moments of action (2019, 47-48). An action scenario approach can put such a claim to the test and provide evidence to support or refute it by analyzing films considered representative of the pure action cycle and compare the duration and frequency of their action moments to those appearing in films from an earlier period. One important metric that can be used to that end is the ratio of total action time manifested in a film compared to its overall story duration (hereafter labelled the ASD ratio), a ratio that excludes opening title and end-title sequences that do not depict the film’s story itself. On that basis, one can establish the average action to film story duration ratio (hereafter labelled the AASD ratio) for a particular historical period and compare it with another period. By setting out changes in the AASD ratio from a representative sample of films from a particular period in film history, one can investigate more narrowed historical questions as to the factors that drove such changes, be they social, economic, or institutional in nature.
An action scenario approach can also be used to ascertain the action profiles of specific genres in which action typically features. Adventure films, westerns, combat films, police-crime thrillers, martial arts films, samurai films, espionage films, fantasy films, and superhero films are routinely cited as genres that exhibit action moments as one of their central traits. An action scenario approach can further specify these genres by establishing their distinctive action scenario forms as well their AASD ratios to ascertain whether these dimensions make them distinctive from each other. Further, such an analysis can be combined with the historical investigations outlined above, to chart the development of a genre with regard to its composition of action forms, as well as any changes to AASD ratios over time.
Four-Act Structure
Another notable form of analysis that will be covered in this website is to examine how action is disturbed across a film in relation to a film’s act structure. Kristin Thompson (1999) has convincingly argued that it is better to understand mainstream films as possessing a four-act structure, instead of a three-act structure as put forward by Syd Field’s influential screenwriting manual Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (1979). Thompson contends that the lengthy middle act in Field’s three-act model, which assumes one-half of a film’s story duration, normally possesses a central midpoint upon which the story pivots. The central midpoint also tends to fall at the halfway point of a film’s story duration, once one excludes titles that are not part of a film’s plot. Since that midpoint is indistinguishable from the type of plot-turns usually identified to separate the first act and the third act from the central middle act, Thompson argues that midpoint effectively splits the middle act into two, creating four acts in total (1999, 22-33), which she then redescribes as the setup, the complicating action, the development and the climax (28-29).
Using Thompson’s four-act model, a film can be broken down into four large narrative segments by identifying its three central plot-turns, and then analyzed in relation to how action is apportioned to each of these acts. Not only can a film’s action profile be characterized by its unique composition of action forms and its ASD ratio, but it can also be distinguished by how it apportions action in each of its four acts. That apportioning can be tabulated as total action time per act and also expressed as a ratio of total action time to the act’s duration (hereafter labelled the AAD ratio). One can also code such action apportioning as a 4-digit series of numbers running from 1 to 4, with each digit representing their respective act in a film, and are sequentially ordered in terms of increasing magnitudes of total action time. For example, a recurrent action film structure consists of 3124 sequence in which the third act has the lowest total action time, while the fourth act has the largest. Films that exhibit a 3124 action structure are The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Black Panther (2018). Such structures can also be represented graphically, as illustrated by Black Panther’s action structure:
As illustrated, the film’s fourth act has a total action time of 13 minutes and 42 seconds, while its third act only has 3 minutes and 27 seconds, of action time. Such action structures can be further studied in relation to a film’s plot construction, in ways that can reveal their narrative significance.
National Cinemas
Another contribution to action scholarship in film studies that this website intends to make is to analyze the action profiles of genres that are representative of other national cinemas. Hong Kong cinema, for instance, is noted for its martial arts films as well as its heroic bloodshed films, police-crime thrillers noted for their replacement of martial arts fights with gunplay. An action scenario approach can compare them to comparable Hollywood genres in relation to their action profiles, as expressed through action form composition, AASD ratios, as well as their recurrent action structures. Similar comparisons can be made with the Japanese samurai film as well as the Italian spaghetti western.
To undertake such investigations, the website offers an initial database of ten films analyzed with respect to their action profiles, which will be further populated with additional data from other films to create a larger and more robust data set. While I anticipate this website will be of interest to action film scholars, I also hope that the information found here will also be of interest to film enthusiasts who are connoisseurs of action cinema.
References:
Gallagher, Mark. 2006. Action Figures: Men, Action Films, and Contemporary Adventure Narratives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jeffords, Susan. 1994. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Kendrick, James. 2019. “A Genre of Its Own: From Westerns, to Vigilantes, to Pure Action” in James Kendrick (ed.) A Companion to the Action Film. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. pp. 35-54.
King, Geoff. 2000. Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster. London: I.B. Tauris.
Lichtenfeld, Eric. 2007. Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie. Revised and Expanded Edition. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Tasker, Yvonne. 1993. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action cinema. London: Routledge.
Thompson, Kristin. 1999. Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Whissel, Kristen. 2014. Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press.
Williams, Tony. 2019. “The Strange Case of Carlos Ray Norris: Reactionary Masculinity and Its Imaginary Discontents: in James Kendrick (ed.) A Companion to the Action Film. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. pp. 270-288.